The purpose of this study is to find out which environmental childhood factors have an impact on the Finnish top-level volleyball players’ sporting success. The athletes’ childhood is scrutinised in relation to the physical, social and psychological environmental factors. The research focuses on the athletes’ childhood as this phase is particularly important on the way to success. In other words, childhood creates the basis for the future sporting success. It is important to research the environmental childhood factors as the outcomes of the research may be used to enhance the activity models relevant to sporting success. The outcomes may benefit Finnish top-level sports, especially Finnish volleyball. The target group of this study consists of Finnish top-level volleyball players. The athletes have played in the Finnish Mestaruusliiga or in one of the Finnish senior national teams. In total, 72 volleyball players participated in the study. 40 (56 %) of the participants were women and 32 (44 %) were men. 71 (99 %) of the volleyball players have played in the Finnish Mestaruusliiga and 31 (43 %) of them have played in one of the Finnish senior national teams. The data for the study was collected using a survey and it was analysed by quantitative research methods. In this context, IBM SPSS Statistics 24 –program was used to analyse the data. Moreover, the analysis methods were standard deviation, minimum and maximum values, percentage terms, and average values. The outcomes of the research were compared in relation to sex and sporting success. The comparison was conducted using the t – test, cross tabulation, chi square test and one-way analysis of variance. The main outcomes of the research indicate that most of the top-level volleyball players lived their childhood in an urban municipality with good sporting possibilities. In average, the young athletes practiced four different sports. They started to play volleyball in a club at the age of 8 and chose volleyball as their main sport at the age of 13. Most of the athletes were born at the second quarter of the year (April-June) and are commonly the youngest sibling of their family. Sport has been an important value in the volleyball players’ families. The support and encouragement of the parents have contributed to playing volleyball. On the other hand, the most noteworthy psychological factors of playing volleyball have been its meaningfulness and succeeding in it better than the peers. Most of the top-level volleyball players experienced expectations to success in their childhood. On the contrary, they did not experience pressure.